Wolf's Cross (18 page)

For a time, it was as if the thinking part of her mind had shut down, ceding all authority to the ecstatic wrath within her. She felt the seams give way on her clothes, but her only reaction was to cast her skirts aside because they encumbered her legs.

His scent grew sharper, closer, and she snarled without thinking how inhuman the sound seemed.

She was catching up to him, closing the distance as her stride lengthened. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, and she started grabbing the ground ahead of her with clawed hands, pulling herself more quickly through the forest.

Then he was in front of her.

She screamed, “Darien!,” her voice half a growl as she leapt at him. He tried to dodge, but she wasn’t about to let him get away. She swung her arm at him as she passed by him. Her hand connected with his back, and he tumbled to the ground with the force of the blow.

She felt her claws bite flesh, and suddenly the air was filled with the scent of blood.

Claws
.

Blood
.

She slammed into the ground, rolling across the forest floor. The focus of her rage crumbled.

Claws
.

Blood
.

Maria swallowed as she pushed herself up out of the dead leaves and undergrowth. She panted, shaking her head, trying to deny the things she felt. The things she saw. Her hands weren’t her hands. They were the hands of some demon—clawed, black-furred, twice as large as her hands should be.

And even though the hands didn’t belong to her, they moved when she flexed them.

“No,” she whispered, tears of fear and rage blurring her vision. When she spoke, her tongue felt a mouth too long, teeth too sharp, lips too thin. Her entire body felt as if it were on the verge of explosion, every muscle vibrating with the effort of remaining still.

He is the Devil
, she thought,
and he has taken me
.

“You win.”

She spun her head around, muzzle snapping at the sound of his voice. She saw him clearly in the silver-gray light, holding her cross in front of him.

“You can have it back, if you still want it.”

She roared at him and jumped.
“What did you do to me?”
This time, he managed to dodge aside with a speed he hadn’t shown before.

“I set you free,” he called to her. “I set you free, and you are magnificent!”

She spun around, but she didn’t see him. “Don’t hide from me!”

His scent was all around her now, and so was the sound of rustling underbrush. He moved faster than even her demon senses could follow. It was as if he was on all sides of her at once.
She kept turning, trying to discern where he was in the shadows around her.

“I won’t hide from you, Maria.” The voice came from behind her, and she spun to face it. “But I don’t wish to face you in anger.” Behind her again, farther away.

She turned, screaming something that was half words, half a lupine howl:
“Face me!”

“Return to the woods with a calm heart, and I will show you things you’ve never imagined.” His voice was far away now.

“A calm heart?
Are you mad?
” She struck out at a shadow. It wasn’t Darien, but she attacked it anyway. When the haze of anger faded, she found herself in front of a young tree, its trunk the thickness of her thigh, splintered and bleeding sap.

Maria, do you know what you are?

“Darien!” she screamed into the night.

He didn’t answer.

She stared down at her hands.

Splinters and bark stuck to black fur on the backs, and when she turned them over, her fingers and palms had pads like a dog’s or a wolf’s. She licked her lips unconsciously and felt her nose at the end of a long, pointed muzzle. She raised her hands to her face.

It isn’t true. This is some sort of nightmare
.

She turned away from the tree and tried to take a step, but now that the rage had leaked away, she suddenly became aware of the changes in her legs. She tangled herself up in them and toppled over.

She curled into a ball on the forest floor, crying.

“What am I?” she sobbed.

But no one answered.

A
fter a time, praying to God to return her body, Maria began to itch. She rubbed her arms and realized that her fingers touched naked skin. She sat upright, hugging herself, realizing that her prayers had been answered. The skin she inhabited was suddenly her own again. Like the change before, she had been too absorbed in emotion to remember exactly when it had happened.

A dream
, she thought. It had all been some nightmarish fantasy.

But when she looked behind her, the wounded tree still bled sap from its splintered trunk. And bark and splinters were caught under her fingernails.

She was also sitting naked on the forest floor.

“This was no dream,” she whispered, flexing her now-human fingers.

She stood, brushing leaves and branches from her skin. A few paces away, the cross lay where Darien had dropped it.
If you still want it
, he had said.

She picked it up.

Was this all that had been keeping that nightmare from happening?

The wolf thing she had become, was
that
the Devil her father had been warning her of? Was
she
the Devil?

That thing protects them, not you
. Darien’s words echoed, unwanted, in her skull.

Her hands shook as she placed the cross around her neck. She stood in the forest, naked and alone, staring up at the small sliver of glowing cloud visible through the shadowed trees.

“What do I do?” The words were barely a whisper, but her whole body shook with the anguish of the question. “God, please help me. What do I
do
?”

Somewhere, far away in the forest, she imagined she heard Darien laughing.

F
or a long time she resisted going home, afraid that the beast within her might hurt her family. But where else could she go?

After a while, she decided to trust in the cross. Removing it had been what had called forth the demon. If she obeyed her father and kept it on, her family should be safe …

“Forgive me, Papa.”

She followed her trail back to the path, finding her damaged, mud-stained clothes. She barely remembered shedding them in her fury.

I have never been so angry. Not even at Lukasz …

But what would she have done to stop Lukasz if it weren’t for the cross she wore? Even without it, she had landed a blow that had broken his cheekbone. What if that hand had been massive, furred, and clawed? What if she had done to Lukasz what she had done to that tree?

I could have been that angry at him. If Darien hadn’t stopped him
.

She walked home, her mind tumbling over itself, asking questions
she didn’t have answers to. Who was Darien? How did he know what lived inside her? Why did he find such glee in drawing it out, tormenting her with it? Why was she cursed with this thing?

What do I do?

She stumbled though the gate and pushed open the door to the cabin.

“Maria, my child, what happened?”

Her stepmother ran to her out of the darkness and grabbed her shoulders. “Where have you been? What happened to your clothes?” She looked into Maria’s eyes with a familiar intensity. Even in the dim, overcast night, Maria could see the same fear and terror in her stepmother’s eyes that she had seen in her father’s before he died.

“Did you take it off?” her stepmother asked.

Something sank in her heart as she suddenly realized why her father had screamed the same question at her. The Germans had been torn apart by some vicious animal, and that news had reached him before she had returned from the fortress. He had heard the descriptions of what had happened to the Germans and he had thought
she
had done it.

“Maria.” Her stepmother shook her shoulders, trying to get her attention. “Your cross. You still wear it?”

Maria blinked up at her stepmother and nodded. It wasn’t quite a lie, but she could barely bring herself to speak. She pulled aside her immodestly torn chemise to show the cross resting over her heart.

“Thank God,” her stepmother whispered. She pulled Maria into a hug and rocked her back and forth. “Thank God, you’re safe.”

Do you know what you embrace?

“Please, child, tell me what happened.”

“A man, in the woods. He …” She sucked in a breath and
buried her face in her stepmother’s shoulder. “He frightened me,” she whispered. “I saw him, and he frightened me. I ran. I ran for a long time.”

“Oh, my baby. You’re safe home now.” Her stepmother paused a moment and asked, “Did he harm you?”

“No.”
Not in the way you mean
. “I was lost, and I didn’t see him again.”

“You’re safe at home now,” her stepmother whispered. “Nothing will happen to you here.”

As Maria cried into her stepmother’s shoulder, she began to realize that her stepmother didn’t blame her for her husband’s death, or care that she was her husband’s bastard.

But maybe she should
.

A
calm heart
.

Darien thought of the words he had spoken, and what he had asked of her. He knew more than ever that she was his, that their meeting was fate. More than fate—it was something as self-evident as the coming dawn.

It didn’t mean that things would be effortless, however.

In the years he had hunted the creature man and sought revenge on the Order itself, he had never come across another of his kind. Not living, in any event. When she’d chased him through the woods, he had not even seen her embrace the wolf in her rage. When she had jumped upon him, he’d been ill-prepared to feel her claws dig through his back. Though it had been glancing, he’d felt a rib give way under the blow.

That had ended the game. He couldn’t hang on to her trinket as splinters of bone pierced his lung. He gave up the cross and scrambled away from a creature that was awe-inspiring in its raw fury.

Even in his pain, he circled around, just so he could look upon her. Long-limbed, lithe, and muscular, wrapped in a pelt of pure midnight, her face long and narrow; and in her muzzle, her teeth glistened like stars as she snarled at him.

She
was
magnificent. And it was all he could do to keep from running to her, even if the result would be more clawed flesh and broken bones.

But it wasn’t the time. It was clear that these human wretches had raised her as one of them. Bound her. Crippled her. There was no telling what lies she had been fed about herself, or her kind. He needed to take care with her, no matter his own excitement or his own desires.

In the end, he wanted her to come to him.

But still, he followed her.

And in the morning, when she left her cottage, Darien was in the woods, watching. He watched as a man accompanied her, bearing an axe. He tensed his haunches, preparing to tear the throat from this man, but then he heard them speak, and heard her call him her brother.

So he didn’t attack. And when they walked along the path toward the fortress, he followed—a giant wolf padding silently through the woods next to them.